Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Capilano Review 3.8: Moodyville

Continuing a thread of years’ worth of theme issues comes The Capilano Review3.8, “Moodyville,” produced as a co-publication with Presentation House Gallery, in an issue of poetry, fiction, essays, film stills, interviews and visual art on and around North Vancouver. As Helga Pakasaar writes in her piece, “Moodyville,”:

For the Moodyville exhibition, seven artists were invited to produce new works that respond to North Vancouver—the locale of Presentation House Galley and its home in a designated heritage building. The show’s title suggests an imaginary place, a state of mind, and a particular history, especially the city’s ties to resource extraction industries. Moodyville was the earliest non-indiginous and industrial settlement on Burrard Inlet. Founded in 1872 near today’s Saskatchewan Wheat Pool terminal, it was a prosperous, albeit short-lived, sawmill community that boasted the first library in the Burrard Inlet. Invoking the city’s beginnings through collective urban memory, the Moodyville project explores changes in civic identity as visions of the future relate to a barely-remembered past.

In sleep so thickthe panels of the truckspivot through the birds & bricksthat flap above the viaductson downs as soft as poplar fluffrevealing projects never needed,zombie gardens never weeded& a ragged couch’s burning fleeceprompts no visit from police—a hermaphroditic orderin the standing watera kind of turbid fluxflaps above the viaducts (Peter Culley, “Five North Vancouver Trees”)